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Internet television (otherwise known as Internet TV, Catch-up TV or Online TV) is television service distributed via the Internet. It has become very popular at the end of the first decade of the 21st century due to services such as the BBC iPlayer (in and limited to the United Kingdom) and Hulu (limited to the United States); see List of Internet television providers.
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Internet television allows its users to choose the program or the TV show they want to watch from an archive of programs or from a channel directory. The 2 forms of viewing Internet television are streaming the content directly to a media player or simply downloading the program/show onto the users computer. With the "TV on Demand" market growing, these on demand websites or applications are a must have for major televison broadcasters. For example the BBC's iPlayer brings in users which stream more than One Million videos per week, with one of the BBC's headline shows "The Apprentice" taking over 3 - 5% of the UK's internet traffic due to people watching the first episode on iPlayer.
Every night the use of On Demand TV peaks at around 10pm, Most providers of the service provide several different formats and quality controls so that the service can be viewed on many different devices. Some services now offer a HD service along side their SD, streaming is the same but offers the quality of HD to the device being used, as long as it is using a HD screen. During Peak times the BBC's iPlayer sends out 12GB (Gigabytes) worth of information a second, around the same as sending out 20 DVDs content per second.Over the course of a month the iPlayer sends out & Petabytes of information which is the same as 11 Million Dvd's content. This wide use of on demand serivces is causing Internet Service Providers a great deal of issues.
Before 2006 any Catch-up services were mostly P2P (Peer to Peer), where users would download an application and data would be shared between the users rather than the service provider giving the now more commonly used steaming method. Now most service providers have moved away from the P2P idea and are now using the Streaming method. This is goodfor the service provider as in the old P2P system the distribution costs were high and the servers normaly couldn't handle the large amount of downloading and data transfer.
Many providers of internet television services exist including conventional television stations that have taken advantage of the internet as way to continue showing programmes after they have been broadcast often advertised as "On Demand" and "Catch Up" services. Examples include the BBC, which introduced the BBC iPlayer on 25 June 2008 as an extentsion to its "RadioPlayer" and already existing streamed video clip content, and Channel 4 that launched 4oD ("4 on Demand") in November 2006 allowing users to watch recently shown content. Most internet television services allow users to view content free of charge however some content is charged for, Channel 4's internet television service employs a pay per-download system for some of its content. Other internet television providers include ITV player, Demand Five, Eurosport player and Sky Player.
With the exception of Internet connectivity costs many online television channels or sites are free. These sites maintain this free TV policy through the use of advertising, short commercials and banner adverts may show up before a video is played. An example of this is on the abc.com catch up website; in place of the advert breaks on normal television a short 30 second advert is played. This short advertising time means that the user does not get fed up and money can be made off of advertising, to allow web designers to offer quality content which would otherwise cost. This is how online TV makes a profit.
The main problem with on demand video services that are applications on desktop computers is getting users to download them and register. It is far easier for a user to simply log onto a webpage without registering than to have to spend time registering and downloading often large programs.
However applications are more powerful in that they can manage the downloading of content far better and these programs can usually be watched offline for 30 days after downloading.